How Big is a Gigabyte Really? Hint It Isn’t 1024 MegaBytes

A Gigabyte can be any number from 1,000,000,000 bytes to 1,073,741,824 bytes. That is a 7% difference. How Big is your Hard Drive, USB Stick, or Memory?

Kilo = 1000 -1024 BytesMega = 1000-1024 KiloGiga = 1000-1024 Mega

For those of you whom do not know what a gigabyte is, it is a multiple of the unit byte for information stored digitally. The “giga” means 109 in the International System of Units (SI), therefore 1 gigabyte is 1000000000bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB or Gbyte.

Some examples of gigabyte storage:

One hour of SDTV video at 2.2 Mbit/s is approximately 1 GB.

Seven minutes of HDTV video at 19.39 Mbit/s is approximately 1 GB.

114 minutes of uncompressed CD-quality audio at 1.4 Mbit/s is approximately 1 GB.